Opened the fridge this morning, looking for an egg, and suffered a flicker of regret at turning down a new career path (ie. midwifery; perhaps the egg twigged it). I remember blogging last winter about wanting to escape out from under the expectation that my writing would need to earn a living (even a modest living) -- a sweet dream of writing for pleasure, while pursuing work that would be very different indeed. I blogged about the writer's cycle of survival, which involves filling out many application forms, a cycle that feels like one is perpetually asking for help. How exhausted I felt by the cycle. How I hated asking for help.
And yet here I am, several months on, willingly filling out more application forms.
It doesn't feel like I'm asking for help, just now. It feels more like an elaborate gamble, which is how my writing life feels, in truth. My maternal grandfather was a gambler. He loved the horses. Like most gamblers, he probably lost more than he won, but he talked a big game. I think of myself as essentially cautious -- hey, we've lived in the same house for a decade and I never try anything new with my hair -- but that may be partly illusion.
When I consider the choices I've made in my life, the risks I can stomach, the hope I can generate against slim odds, the faith in the race, I'm not so far removed from my gramps. When it comes right down to it, I'm pretty much a gambler at heart. Or maybe it's at gut rather than heart, the gut being the location of much of the gambler's decision-making. It feels right, or it doesn't. That's as clear as it gets for me.
I have the gambler's ability to look forward rather than back. Or elsewhere, rather than here. I separate myself into possibilities, hiving off rejection, stepping free from what isn't to be with an energy that may flag but oddly doesn't seem to deplete. I just finished reading Aleksander Hemon's collection of essays "The Book of My Lives," and he writes in his final essay something that rings true to my instincts, to what I know about why I write, too: "In my books, fictional characters allowed me to understand what was hard for me to understand (which, so far, has been nearly everything). I'd found myself with an excess of words, the wealth of which far exceeded the pathetic limits of my biography. I'd needed narrative space to extend myself into; I'd needed more lives. I'd cooked up those avatars in the soup of my ever-changing self, but they were not me -- they did what I wouldn't or couldn't."
My agent tells me, gently, that very few fiction writers survive on their writing alone; most have other jobs. I know this is true. I did very much want to develop a different and separate career, especially one with security, but the truth of it is that my writing hours are essentially full-time as it is, and I am also in the thick of it with my four kids, and there isn't time or space or energy to add a third parallel life into the mix without sacrificing one or both of the other two occupations.
So I'm back to gambling.
But more precisely, I'm back to the imagination. This is a gamble both literal and figurative. I gamble every time I send a project out to be assessed, in hopes it will find favour and win support, and that process I could take or leave, quite honestly, except that I can't and I won't because it's in support of the larger and more profound gamble to which I see I'm truly bound, and that is the wild, wonderful, risky, ever-creative, potentially illuminating, grace-filled gamble of making something from scratch, of writing more lives than I could ever live. How could I give it up? What wouldn't I do to keep this gamble going?
It's unsteady ground, and it has its practical limitations, as Hemon goes on to express heart-rendingly in the same essay, but it's familiar. It's known. I know here. I am suddenly reminded that I used to listen rather obsessively to Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler" the summer that I was ten, and we were living with my aunt and uncle in Tennessee, before moving to Canada. "You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run. You never count your money when you're sitting at the table. There'll be time enough for counting when the dealing's done."
No counting shall I do.Labels: essays, imagine, money, non-fiction, spirit, work, writing